News Foils

First, let's look at a typical climate science denial from the Braintrust at the Tribune-Review:

During an unusually chilly Memorial Day weekend, which felt more like a brisk Labor Day weekend, a New York ski resort near the Vermont border reported up to 3 feet of snow. Writes Roger L. Simon of PJ Media, “Somewhere Al Gore is gnashing his teeth, while concocting another speech to tell us that cooling actually means warming or some such palaver.”

Now let's look at what they're actually saying up in Vermont - this was from early February:

The three Vermont legislative committees picked the right day last week to hold a joint hearing on the effects of climate change on businesses.  Some people were late after having to pick their way through the remnants of overnight freezing rain. As the hearing progressed, temperatures outdoors rose toward record heights. Weather forecasters talked of flood and wind alerts, and warned of plunging temperatures the next day.  The consensus among the 40 or so people who testified at Wednesday’s hearing was not so much that we must adapt to climate change in the future, but that we’re being forced to adapt already, and we must continue.  The most challenging part of the adaptation is not the warmer, wetter climate we’re increasingly experiencing. What is particularly vexing are the wild, odd swings in temperature and precipitation — the kind that were going on outside the Vermont Statehouse as lawmakers and witnesses spoke — that make planning, producing and stability more difficult.  [Emphasis added]

Wild, odd swings in temperature and precipitation like 3 feet of snow on Memorial Day?

I guess we have to talk again about the differences between CLIMATE and WEATHER.  From NASA:

Weather is basically the way the atmosphere is behaving, mainly with respect to its effects upon life and human activities. The difference between weather and climate is that weather consists of the short-term (minutes to months) changes in the atmosphere. Most people think of weather in terms of temperature, humidity, precipitation, cloudiness, brightness, visibility, wind, and atmospheric pressure, as in high and low pressure.

In most places, weather can change from minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, day-to-day, and season-to-season. Climate, however, is the average of weather over time and space. An easy way to remember the difference is that climate is what you expect, like a very hot summer, and weather is what you get, like a hot day with pop-up thunderstorms.

Speaking of which, did you know that the Weather Channel is forecasting 81 degrees for Whiteface Mountain today?

 That's the place that had the 3 feet of snow earlier this week.

Odd swings in temperature and precipitation due to climate change.  Yep, it's all there.